The Nation is the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States, a successor to William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator.[2] The periodical, devoted to politics and culture, is self-described as "the flagship of the left."[3] Founded on July 6, 1865, it is published by The Nation Company, L.P., at 33 Irving Place, New York City.[4] It is associated with The Nation Institute.

The Nation has bureaus in Washington, D.C., London, and South Africa, with departments covering architecture, art, corporations, defense, environment, films, legal affairs, music, peace and disarmament, poetry, and the United Nations. Circulation peaked at 187,000 in 2006 but by 2010 had dropped back to 145,000 in print, though digital subscriptions had risen to over 15,000.[5] Print ad pages declined by 5% from 2009 to 2010, while digital advertising rose 32.8% from 2009–10.[6] Advertising accounts for 10% of total revenue for the magazine, while circulation totals 60%.[5]The Nation has lost money in all but three or four years of operation and is sustained in part by a group of more than 30,000 donors called Nation Associates, who donate funds to the periodical above and beyond their annual subscription fees. This program accounts for 30% of the total revenue for the magazine. An annual cruise also generates $200,000 for the magazine.[5] Since late 2012, the Nation Associates program has been called Nation Builders.[7]

Contents

The Nation was established in July 1865 on "Newspaper Row" at 130 Nassau Street in Manhattan. The publisher was Joseph H. Richards, and the editor was Edwin Lawrence Godkin, an immigrant from Ireland who had formerly worked as a correspondent of the London Daily News and The New York Times.[8][9] Godkin, a classical liberal, sought to establish what one sympathetic commentator later characterized as "an organ of opinion characterized in its utterance by breadth and deliberation, an organ which should identify itself with causes, and which should give its support to parties primarily as representative of these causes."[10]

In the first year of publication, one of the magazine's regular features was The South As It Is, dispatches from a tour of the war-torn region by John Richard Dennett, a recent Harvard graduate and a veteran of the Port Royal Experiment. Dennett interviewed Confederate veterans, freed slaves, agents of the Freedmen's Bureau, and ordinary people he met by the side of the road. The articles, since collected as a book, have been praised by The New York Times as "examples of masterly journalism."

Among the causes supported by the publication in its earliest days was civil service reform—moving the basis of government employment from a political patronage system to a professional bureaucracy based upon meritocracy.[10]The Nation also was preoccupied with the reestablishment of a sound national currency in the years after the American Civil War, arguing that a stable currency was necessary to restore the economic stability of the nation.[11] Closely related to this was the publication's advocacy of the elimination of protective tariffs in favor of lower prices of consumer goods associated with a free trade system.[12]

In 1881, newspaperman-turned-railroad-baron Henry Villard acquired The Nation and converted it into a weekly literary supplement for his daily newspaper the New York Evening Post. The offices of the magazine were moved to the Evening Post '​s headquarters at 210 Broadway. The New York Evening Post would later morph into a tabloid; the New York Post was a left-leaning afternoon tabloid under owner Dorothy Schiff from 1939 to 1976 and, since then, has been a conservative tabloid owned by Rupert Murdoch, while The Nation became known for its markedly leftist politics.

In 1900, Henry Villard's son, Oswald Garrison Villard, inherited the magazine and the Evening Post, selling off the latter in 1918. Thereafter, he remade The Nation into a current affairs publication and gave it an anti-classical liberal orientation: Oswald Villard welcomed the New Deal and supported the nationalization of industries – thus reversing the meaning of "liberalism" as the founders of The Nation would have understood the term, from a belief in a smaller and more restricted government to a belief in a larger and less restricted government. Villard's takeover prompted the FBI to monitor the magazine for roughly 50 years. The FBI had a file on Villard from 1915. Villard sold the magazine in 1935. It became a nonprofit in 1943.

Almost every editor of The Nation from Villard's time to the 1970s was looked at for "subversive" activities and ties.[13] When Albert Jay Nock, not long after, published a column criticizing Samuel Gompers and trade unions for being complicit in the war machine of the First World War, The Nation was briefly suspended from the U.S. mail.[14]

The magazine's financial problems in early 1940s prompted Kirchwey to sell her individual ownership of the magazine in 1943, creating a nonprofit organization, Nation Associates, formed out of the money generated from a recruiting drive of sponsors. This organization was also responsible for academic responsibilities, including conducting research and organizing conferences, that had been a part of the early history of the magazine. Nation Associates became responsible for the operation and publication of the magazine on a nonprofit basis, with Kirchwey as both president of Nation Associates and editor of The Nation magazine.[15]

Before Pearl Harbor, The Nation repeatedly called on the United States to enter World War Two to resist Fascism, and after the US entered the war, supported the American war effort.[16] It also supported the use of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.[16]

During the late 1940s and again in the early 1950s, a merger was discussed by The Nation '​s Freda Kirchwey (later Carey McWilliams) and The New Republic '​s Michael Straight. The two magazines were very similar at that time—both were left of center, The Nation further left than TNR; both had circulations around 100,000, TNR had a slightly higher circulation; and both lost money—and it was thought that the two magazines could unite and make the most powerful journal of opinion. The new publication would have been called The Nation and New Republic. Kirchwey was the most hesitant, and both attempts to merge failed. The two magazines would later take very different paths, with The Nation having a higher circulation and The New Republic moving more to the right.[17]

In the 1950s, The Nation was attacked as "pro-communist" because of its advocacy of friendship with the Soviet Union,[18] and its criticism of McCarthyism.[9] One of the magazine's writers, Louis Fischer resigned from the magazine afterwards, claiming The Nation's foreign coverage was too pro-Soviet.[18] Despite this, Diana Trilling pointed out that Kirchwey did allow anti-Soviet writers such as herself, to contribute material critical of Russia to the magazine's arts section.[19]

During the Second Red Scare, The Nation was banned from several school libraries in New York City and Newark,[20] and an Bartlesville, Oklahoma librarian, Ruth Brown, was fired from her job in 1950, after a citizens committee complained she had given shelf space to The Nation.[20]

During the 1950s, Paul Blanshard, a former Associate Editor, served as The Nation '​s special correspondent in Uzbekistan. His most famous writing was a series of articles attacking the Roman Catholic Church in America as a dangerous, powerful and undemocratic institution.

The appearance in The Nation of advertisements from the organization Facts and Logic About the Middle East (FLAME) was criticized by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. In response, The Nation stated: "From our point of view, [the ad] purveys one of the most destructive myths of Israel‘s right wing, namely, that Palestinians have no legitimate national rights.... We run it because The Nation‘s ad policy starts with the presumption that "we will accept advertising even if the views expressed are repugnant to those of the editors" .... Ads that present a political point of view are considered to fall under our editorial commitment to freedom of speech and, perforce, we grant them the same latitude we claim for our own views. But we do reserve the right to denounce the content of such ads".[23]

^Kimball, Penn (22 March 1986). "The History of The Nation According to the FBI". The Nation: 399–426. ISSN0027-8378.

^Wreszin, Michael (1969). "Albert Jay Nock and the Anarchist Elitist Tradition in America". American Quarterly (The Johns Hopkins University Press) 21 (2): 173. doi:10.2307/2711573. JSTOR2711573. It was probably the only time any publication was suppressed in America for attacking a labor leader, but the suspension seemed to document Nock's charges.